>> Support for "AI: Unpacking the Black Box" comes from viewers like you and from Goodwill Keystone Area.

It's the last tea party for Krista with Miss Marshmallow and Sarah's first day of management training at Goodwill.

When you donate to Goodwill, you help provide skills, training, and career placement, and the things you loved start a new life, too.

>> Imagine yourself as a renowned painter in the bustling art world of the 1800s.

Your skilled hands have captured the essence of countless individuals, immortalizing them on canvas with delicate brushstrokes and vibrant colors.

Now, your reputation precedes you, and your works adorn the walls of the most prestigious homes and galleries.

Now, each portrait is a testament to your ability to see beyond the surface, to capture not just a likeness, but the very soul of your subjects.

Now, one fateful day, you find yourself at a gathering of society's elite.

The air buzzes with excitement as a curious contraption is unveiled.

A camera, they call it.

And you watch with a mixture of fascination and skepticism.

As a gentleman poses stiffly before the device, you think, "What is this device?"

Until you look to the right and you see photos lining the wall.

The crowd gasps in awe as they make the connection.

But you furrow your brow, uncertain of what to make of this mechanical intruder into your world.

And initially, you dismiss the newfangled technology.

It's a mere novelty, you think, incapable of capturing the true spirit of a person.

You reassure yourself that your art, born of years of study and practice, understanding of the human form and the psyche, could never be replaced by a machine.

But then you remember all of those photos lining the wall.

One of those families were the Hendersons, whose portrait you had painstakingly crafted just months ago.

This machine, this soulless contraption, threatens to render your life's work obsolete.

In the weeks that follow, you notice a decline in commissions.

Whispers reach the ears of other artists struggling and studios closing.

You watch as the world around you changes as photography studios spring up where once there were painters' workshops.

You grapple with the need to adapt to find a new way to express your artistry in this changing world.

Now let us fast-forward to the present day.

You're a graphic designer, proud of your creative flair and your ability to bring your client's visions to life.

You've embraced technology, mastering digital tools and techniques, always staying a step ahead of the curve.

Your work is a blend of artistic sensibility and technical skill.

As you walk into your office one morning, coffee in hand, your mind buzzing with ideas for your latest project, your world is once again turned upside down.

Your boss gathers the team and delivers the news that AI has been implemented that will take over the functions of the art department.

Your job, your passion, and your livelihood all seemingly rendered obsolete in an instant.

Anger surges through you.

You argue vehemently that AI lacks the soul, the emotional depth necessary for true artistic expression.

"It's just a machine," you protest, incapable of understanding the nuances of human experience.

But then you see the AI's work.

Your fingers tremble as you scroll through design after design after design, each one more impressive than the last.

Reluctantly, you admit to yourself that the work is good.

No, not just good.

It's exceptional.

Now, as this reality sinks in, you grapple with a complex mix of emotions.

There's still anger, yes, but also a grudging admiration.

And you find yourself at a crossroads, much like your counterparts from the 1800s.

The world of art and creativity is changing, evolving in ways never imagined possible.

The question now is, how will you adapt?

Will you rail against this new technology, clinging to an outdated notion of creativity, or will you find ways to work alongside it, to push the boundaries of creativity even further?

Perhaps your role will shift from creator to curator, using your human sensibility to guide and refine the AI's output.

Maybe you'll find new ways to infuse the AI's work with human emotion and experience.

As you ponder these possibilities, you begin to see the potential.

AI could handle the time-consuming technical aspects of design, freeing you to focus on the big ideas, the emotional core of each project.

It could generate hundreds of variations in seconds, allowing you to explore creative directions you never would have had the time to before.

How do we define creativity in an age of artificial intelligence?

What role do human artists play when machines can generate art in mere seconds?

How can we ensure that the human element, the emotion, the lived experience, the cultural context remains central to the creative process?

Perhaps most importantly, how can we harness the power of AI to enhance rather than replace human creativity?

Join me as we explore these fascinating questions and more as we stand on the brink of a new era in the world of art and design.

>> So, SAG-AFTRA is the labor union that represents professional performers.

We collectively bargain with the major companies who employ them, such as the studios, the streamers, the major record labels, the video-game companies, and a whole host of others.

Over the last, really, 18 to 24 months, we have been extremely focused on the advent of artificial intelligence.

What I'm really talking about is this new generation of AI, including generative AI, that have the capability to actually replicate humans, to create performances, and to really threaten the sort of building blocks of human creativity that are part of the culture in our society, and we had to get some guardrails in place to protect the core philosophy that we have, which is informed consent and fair compensation.

And those guardrails weren't showing up in public policy.

They weren't coming from anywhere other than from our bargaining.

And the point of that was to really foster a human-centered-approach implementation of AI.

This is not only a distribution issue, this is a creation issue, and that's not something we've seen present itself in the same form.

And when we were dealing with the advent of the Internet or the advent of the VCR, these are all business-model-disrupting technologies.

Even the advent of television -- business-model-disrupting technologies, but not fundamental to creation.

The idea that your face, your voice, your likeness, your movement can be taken by an algorithm and reproduced so convincingly that no one could tell the difference between that and you -- that is a new problem that we, none of us, societally, have had to face.

And I think that's why -- one of the reasons why it's taken so long for public policy to catch up.

And it's another reason why our members see this as existential.

Their career is built on their face, their voice, their body, their talent.

And if somebody can try to just take that and use it without their consent, without paying them, that is an existential threat.

And there are people who really feel like AI is bad for creative people, bad for society.

And, look, I understand where they're coming from.

If we could turn AI's attention to curing cancer and solving unsolvable problems instead of replicating performers, that would be great.

But the reality is, no union and probably no government ever have been able to stop technology from happening.

It didn't work with the, you know, invention of the car, invention of television, invention of the Internet.

But, you know, I also remind myself that even as fast as this technology advances, you know, we've had streaming for a very long time, and, yet, you can still buy DVDs in Target.

So it's not like flipping a light switch on or off.

These things take time.

I am personally not of the view that digital replica is going to take the place of really deep, emotional performances and longer-form content.

>> I was a very imagination-driven kid, which, you know, directly ties into my profession now.

But having these really fully fleshed out, quirky, interesting, mysterious worlds to kind of dive into and characters to keep company with for many hours at a time -- I fell in love with a lot of early game, you know, voiceover performances then and started to think, especially as I was going through high school, what that might be like as a job.

And I really fell in love with voiceover.

Just the freedom of voicing something that I look nothing like was extremely appealing to me, the kind of casualness, the down-to-earth nature of the work itself, and, again, just how, like, liberating it is.

The technology, you know, involved in capturing, creating games has always been moving at a rapid clip.

But if we focus really intently on just this, "What are you using to make more of me that I wasn't there for?

", which is a new paradigm that we're stepping into, that's what we're talking about.

The folks who work, you know, either in the booth with us or on the volume with us -- they understand that this is a collaborative process and they understand and see the effort that it takes, you know, on our bodies and, you know, tax on our bodies, et cetera.

But then it is, you know, we are isolated from the rest of production, you know, for the rest of that process.

And so, on a film set, everyone's kind of sharing this stru-- You're all keeping similar hours and just going through the trenches kind of together.

But for us, that capture part of the process is a little bit, you know, separated from the rest of the process, and so it might be easier to see us as the file that you receive and you implement in your process.

If you're elsewhere in that process, you see us, as, you know, file name and not a human being.

You know, the idea that we are only the data that we're captured in and not performers that you hired in order to perform, performing on a stage, and then also that a player is experiencing.

They're not playing raw data.

They're playing -- They're experiencing a performance.

And that argument is true regardless of the medium we're talking about.

If we're talking about film, the idea that you would say it's not a performance, it's celluloid is pretty disingenuous.

You understand that you hire performers and it's performance here, and then it's performance when a person sees it.

There are some folks who don't want anything to do with it, and then there are some voice actors, you know, I could think who might be happy to have a replica handle some of the more physically damaging-type work.

I mean, games do often contain combat, and that means a lot of, like, physically or vocally stressful, you know, expressions, things sounds like death screams and battle cries and throwing punches, receiving punches.

All these things are made by human tissue right now, right?

And is, you know, a calculation that we make and an athleticism we maintain to kind of do it safely as best we can.

There's always a risk.

So some folks are very happy to have their replica handle some of that, and then that would be, for them, an ethical and an ideal, a positive use for that tool.

Putting the control in the hands of that individual performer to say, "You need to get my permission.

We're going to talk about it.

If that seems reasonable, then you can have my permission.

Sounds great.

Make sure you pay me fairly so you're not just cutting me away from the value that I provide, taking me, taking what is, you know, kind of endemic to me, my performance, and making more of it."

I have to represent everybody.

And I do think that focusing on, you know, transparency, consent, and compensation allows everyone to make a variety of decisions based on the use case, based on their own comfort level, and that that's how we kind of move into a paradigm that's fair and just.

>> I was never an artist by trade, right?

I couldn't draw to save my life.

But I've got all of these creative ideas in my head, and to be able to get that out and onto an image, well, now I share art every day.

It's really a fascinating topic when you think about, okay, what were these models trained on?

And it's becoming kind of more and more evident that they're just scraping the entire Internet and there is copyrighted materials in some of these training sets, and what are the implications of that?

And there's this whole ethical dilemma of, like, how do you prove the authenticity?

How do you do it ethically?

Because of these tools, you don't need to be a professional graphic designer or a professional marketer to be able to compete and create.

And then what's really cool is, you also attracted the creators, the professionals that were doing this and starting to use these tools for the first time.

When you pair expertise with these tools, it's like a superpower, right?

So you've kind of got this democratization of the creative process, and as well as kind of, like, the upskill level up of people who are already experts in these fields.

And the second you start using it yourself to augment things that were either difficult for you or you're trying to, again, shorten, that's when your feeling, I think, starts to change.

I think those people with expertise that are kind of avoiding this are doing themselves a little bit of a disservice in the sense that the people with expertise are the ones that are going to see the most value out of these tools because you know how to talk to them.

The crux of it is education, getting these tools into people's hands.

That's where it starts to feel like magic.

>> We do a lot of visual thinking.

We do a lot of work in that area.

And most of us can't, you know, to save our lives, actually draw or paint, let alone create something that looks visually good enough that someone else would watch it or look at it.

To give humans this new almost an organ -- We have a mouth for language.

Can we build an organ to liberate the visual thoughts that people have in their brains and give them this ability to express that, like, you know, just doesn't exist today.

We need something that is as simple as a pencil.

Like, you know, you give a pencil to a kid, and the first thing they will do is, like, make a mark, right?

They might have never touched it.

It's that intuitive.

What gets done with it?

It's going to be very different.

What kind of scripts are written?

What kind of movies are made?

What kind of things are shared on the Internet?

Different doesn't always mean better.

We teach people to read and write.

They could now read and write and talk to each other, but also, like, you know, express what they're feeling, record their thoughts, record their ideas, come back to them.

It became an extension of their mind.

This is going to be another leap of the same kind to give, you know, millions and billions of people this ability to be able to, like, you know, express themselves, to be able to make things that they would want to make that, you know, they have always wanted to make.

The art is not just in the medium.

The art is what you make with it.

The art is in the stories you want to tell.

And I think, like, you know, people worship Steven Spielberg, of course for all the medium and the advances in cameras and everything that, like, you know, he has done, but also for the kinds of stories he tells and the stories he chooses to tell and the way he edits things, the way he, like -- You know, that is an innately human thing.

People want to watch people.

People want to watch people's stories.

People want to watch, like, you know, drama and, like, things happening between people.

And I think, like, you know, that's going nowhere.

We are changing the computer, but we are not changing the consumer.

They are still the same humans that we have always had.

>> AI is not a substitute for human authors, human creators, and human thinkers.

If anything, it will place a premium on creative thinking, deep thinking, and quality writing.

However, having said that, no one should get complacent, right?

Because it's coming.

Right now, I would characterize as more of a tool at the disposal of authors and publishers.

But, again, I wouldn't make any predictions about where we're going to be in two weeks, two years, 20 years.

So, the book starts with a big idea, and this spark, this inspiration must come from the author, right?

And I see a formula that goes something like this.

Subject-matter expertise plus subject-matter experience equals the big idea.

So once you have those two things and you have a big idea, what you're going to talk about, what you're going to share with the world, that's got to be, you know, something that comes from right up here.

But then, after that, boy, AI is an incredible tool to really help the author along in the content journey.

There is something to be said for the craft of writing that I think will be at a premium now.

You can get serviceable writing from AI today, right?

And if you want premium writing, I think that there is something to be said for that human thinking and that human creativity.

Base-level writing is going to be covered by AI, whether you like it or not.

And so what takes a book from good to great is that thoughtful presentation of experiences that only the author know and can elaborate on.

A big shift in publishing occurred when Amazon opened up their self-publishing platform.

Amazon made it quick and affordable, and you could be a published author by the end of the day, right?

And so that was fantastic for the industry.

It gave people an outlet to express themselves.

But what it also did is, it created a glut of content.

We went from 1x to 10x in terms of content, and unfortunately, a lot of that 9x difference wasn't great.

And now you think about what's going to happen with AI and AI-generated books.

We're going to go from where we are today to 10x number of books, 1,000x number of books, 1 million-x number of books.

And so that's untenable, right?

So we've got to come up with a solution to safeguard the content that ends up in book form.

>> The creative people are very important in the process.

You really need artists.

Like, AI is not replacing artists.

AI is just, you know, making the process efficient.

But, ultimately, you need a director or, like, a creative director or a creative person to guide the AI.

I do see, like, two sides of people, like, some people who are like, really, really trying to embrace technology.

There are people who are, like, really against it.

I talked to a lot of animation artists, as well.

Like, I heard the same thing when computer graphics really changed the animation industry.

And I completely understand why they might feel, you know, scared, because they're all like, "Well, AI replaced my job."

What AI do is, it really enable all kind of possibility, but you need a human to guide it.

>> How are we going to evaluate student work or how are we going to determine what they've done or what they haven't done?

And can we detect what that is and, you know, those false reads and blame someone where they actually did the work is really touchy space.

So you can't just show up and say, "Here's what I did."

And that doesn't -- Because you can't actually adjust it, because I'm thinking for the client.

So if you're my client and you decide, "Hey, I don't like that, could you change that?

", well, that doesn't work.

Where you're really trying to determine who actually owns it.

but as a content creator, you want to be able to own.

You want to be able to pivot and either design for your client and meet them halfway.

And you can't do that with a sentence or a prompt.

It actually takes a lot of psychology and getting to know people to be able to do that.

If you go back to paintings from the 1600s, you name it, that was a falsified depiction.

When you look at it, you got all this wardrobe and everything else, and the whole thing was a prop and they just painted the head on top of it.

The idea of imagery being kind of idealized depiction -- that's always been there.

If there isn't a standard where you have to show your sources or you have to admit that you faked something, I think what it comes down to is that the public has to be more critical and question a lot more of what they're told.

I think, in some cases, the need for authenticity, the need for expression is still there.

I don't think that goes away.

That's a human condition, how you feel heard.

Because if I want to go and do some sort of creative expression of my own, I'm not bound by what tools are out there.

It's just an option.

The human experience, the idea of the state of all that someone achieved, the level to paint that painting or someone achieved the level to play that, I just stood in the same space as someone who got to that level.

All of this digitization -- it's actually about the human experience, and the appreciation of that, I think, is what will be missing because it's artificial.

It's like when you walk by the magazines on the grocery store, and no one looks like that in real life.

>> I never considered myself to be a creative, you know, and I'm sure that's probably going to be some controversy for people listening to this that are opposed to AI, but getting access to generative AI felt like it unlocked something in my brain.

To be able to just sit down and prompt my thoughts and see back what I'm thinking.

one, the technology probably can unlock something, but, two, it immediately felt like, "Wow, I have a voice all of a sudden and I have an opportunity here to kind of share what I'm doing and share how excited I am."

There is a difference between AI-generated art and AI art or an AI artist.

So, you can sit down with an image generator and you can prompt a cat in a hat, and you will receive a cat wearing a hat.

That is an AI-generated image, AI-generated art.

An AI artist -- what happens in that process is, you are repeatedly prompting an image or a concept and you are iterating on whatever that happens to be.

So, let's say you want to create an art about cats wearing hats.

You're not just prompting an image.

You're taking the image.

Typically, you get a prompt output.

Maybe you're feeding that back through the image model.

You're prompting on top of that.

Maybe you're taking that to a traditional image-editing software, like a Photoshop.

You're producing human manual labor on top of that image.

It's like having a co-worker that you never thought about being in that room with you and working on this piece as you're going through the process.

And it almost feels like, you know, you're putting a piece of yourself into whatever this piece is, okay?

So, in traditional film, whatever you're going to do, typically, you're going to create a shot list, right?

You're going to create, "Alright, we want a wide shot to begin and then so-and-so enters the room and then maybe we do a medium shot."

And, you know, you create this full script and shot list and you're very specific about how you want this process to go.

AI is completely different.

Typically, what I find when I'm working with AI -- you have a shot in your mind, you're trying to create that shot, and just it's not happening, it's not working that way.

So if you're very rigid and structured to a shot list, again, in a traditional form, you're going to be banging your head against a wall.

I love the weirdness of AI.

I think it just adds something so unique to the outputs.

You know, if you're doing something for, like, commercial use or someone wants to make an advertisement wherever, they're not going to want that.

They're going to want those kind of weird things out.

But from a pure personal creation standpoint, oh, I love it.

I love the weirdness.

I completely understand where the fear comes from.

I completely understand where that visceral reaction comes from.

You know, art is personal.

It's something you create as a release.

And when you feel like something personal to you is attacked, I understand why you did -- you know, fight-or-flight response kicks in.

AI's not going to take that away from you.

That's not what's happening here.

I think you have an ability to learn these tools just as someone who learned Photoshop when Photoshop came out.

Again, if you're a watercolor painter, probably not going to use AI.

Then again, you can train a model on your paintings and see what else comes out.

That's why I say to them like, "Just try taking the leap.

You can't let that fear stop you from trying something new."

>> We stand at a crossroads of human creativity and technological capability.

The potential is boundless.

AI could unlock levels of artistic expression we've never dreamed of, allowing us to create works that were once impossible.

It could make art more accessible than ever before, turning everyone into a potential creator.

But we must also consider what we might lose -- the human element in art, the imperfections, and the unique perspectives shaped by individual experiences, the emotional journey of creation.

These are at risk of being smoothed away by the precision of AI.

Let us not forget the value of the human touch, the beauty of imperfection, and the power of art to connect us to our shared humanity.

As we look to the future, let us approach it not with fear, but with curiosity, not with resistance, but with adaptability.

For, in the end, it's not the tools we use, but the visions we realize and the emotions we evoke that truly define art.

>> Support for "AI: Unpacking the Black Box" comes from viewers like you and from Goodwill Keystone Area.

It's the last tea party for Krista with Miss Marshmallow and Sarah's first day of management training at Goodwill.

When you donate to Goodwill, you help provide skills, training, and career placement, and the things you loved start a new life, too.